Posts tagged ‘anti climax’

My 1990 book Anticlimax, which has been out of print, is being republished by Spinifex Press this month with a new preface. It is a book of which I am particularly fond because I wrote it in the late 1980s, as a way of making sense of my own experience of the ‘sexual revolution’. The sexual history of the 1960s was being written up in the 1980s as a process of women’s sexual liberation. I did not see it that way.

I did remember that the ‘alternative’ magazines of the period, Oz and International Times, were full of women’s naked bodies, albeit painted with flowers often enough, and promoted pornography as liberating. In the book I had the opportunity to look back at what was really going on, through the sex advice literature and the pornography of the time. I wrote Anticlimax, and my first book, The Spinster and Her Enemies (1985/1997), to demonstrate that the ‘sexual revolutions’ of the twentieth century liberated men’s sexual access to women rather than women’s empowerment.

so here we are again. another slutwalk, another sex-positive man organizing it, standing behind women (but not in a creepy way!) and supporting womens god-given right to be sexually penetrated by men. now thats good faux-feminism! and it gets even better than that: this particular dood as recently as earlier today went by the internet handle “molester” on internet forum “formspring”. you know, because sexual assault is funny, and stuff and things. alas, the women who allowed this dood to “help” them pull off slutwalk baltimore probably shouldve done a background check; or at the very least, followed the links he left on his facebook profile, where they wouldve learned about the “molester” thing. oh well! im not blaming the women, really; thats just what happens when you do feminist organizing with men. you have to be super-extra vigilant, and they werent.